A Post-and-Beam Home in Malibu, Rebuilt 20 Years After It First Ran in AD

The open living room is designed to maximize what Michael calls the perfect view of the Malibu coastline. The sofas that make the room are by Roche Bobois; art over the fireplace is also by Kim McCarty.Photo: Shade Degges

“For us, people, art, plants, and a view make a home,” says Michael McCarty of the Malibu house he shares with his wife, Kim. The original house was designed by renowned post-and-beam architect Douglas Rucker. But like everything in the colorful life of the McCartys—he's a culinary entrepreneur, she's an artist—it has a story, too. When Michael purchased the original Rucker in 1976 from his father, he had just returned from studying in France and was teaching cooking classes, in French, at a culinary school in Boulder. Kim, who had grown up in Europe, was fluent in the language and attended his final exam—an 18-course dinner for students and their guests. "I cooked the dessert," Michael recalls,"which was passion fruit soufflé with fresh raspberry coulis… which she loved first, then me second!" The couple moved to Los Angeles, renovating the house in 1979 with help from Doug Rucker himself.

Photo: Shade Degges

Their design philosophy was simple: Strip it back to the essentials. White walls, beams from vertical-grain Douglas fir, sliding-glass windows. Michael wanted the home designed with an eye to Europe and with a modern, Malibu disposition. “The view is the thing,” he says. “The home faces the correct way and is at the right altitude—you look right at the view and can see the Southern California Queen’s Necklace and the Catalina Islands. It’s the perfect view.” The same year, he opened the Santa Monica restaurant Michael’s and applied a similar interior philosophy to that space. During the restaurant's first year, the staff all stayed with the McCartys in Malibu; culinary luminaries like Jonathan Waxman and Sally Clarke were graduates of Michael and Kim’s home. “Everyone was at the house cooking and we had a blast,” says Michael. A vineyard and duck farm emerged on the property. Michael had the first hybrid Moulard ducks in America, a cross between Muscovy and Pekin that he says produce "the best duck for fois gras, confit of the legs and thighs, and breast for grilling or sauté."

Before: The home as it appeared in a 1987 issue of Architectural Digest.

Photo: Mary Nichols

Five years later, the couple added a cantilevered tennis court—where they were later married—and pool house to the property. Tucked underneath the tennis court is Kim’s creatively charged, 1,200-square-foot art studio, with huge windows that bathe it in southern light. Then they began designing another addition, again with Rucker. By 1993, nearly two decades after Michael purchased the property, the original house burned down in the Great Malibu Fire. Only the pool house and tennis court remained. So the couple started again, with new plans. “We took everything about the original house but worked very hard to get the scale to be perfect,” says Kim. “We wanted something extremely intimate but with enough space for everyone to do their own thing.”

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Photo: Shade Degges

The airy, loft-like dining room in Kim and Michael McCarty's Malibu home is a perfect example of the post-and-beam architecture that their architect, Douglas Rucker, championed in Southern California in the late '50s and early '60s. The room is designed around Kim’s 2006 painting “Red Sequence.” Tucroma dining chairs are by Guido Faleschini; the dining table is plywood on a folding-table base; the surfboard is a Simon Anderson Thruster prototype. (Anderson, an Australian competitive surfer, surfboard-shaper, and writer, was credited with the invention of the three-fin surfboard called "the thruster," which remains the industry standard.)

The new version is a perfect example of classic Malibu architecture meets McCarty entertaining magic: white walls for Kim’s art, raw beams, floor-to-ceiling windows, and doors that allow indoor-outdoor living and ample natural light—all topped off with the sophisticated flow of a world-class restaurant. The main room now encompasses a dining room, living room, and the perfectly situated kitchen, comfortably housing anything from an intimate dinner to 40 people on the terrace overlooking the Malibu coastline. “For us it’s about a space that is simple, light, lived-in, and used,” says Kim. And it now has enough rooms for all the kids and their guests. (“Don’t downsize if you want your kids to show up again,” says Kim.)

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